An enterprise or business customer may subscribe to a variety of communication services provided by one or more service providers who operate owned or leased telecommunications equipment. The service provider may allocate common resources of the service provider's telecommunications equipment to a particular customer, while other of the common resources are assigned to other customers. The resources allocated by the service provider to the customer are configured at the service provider's side in accordance with an agreement between the service provider and the customer based on a communication service requested by the customer. The customer premises equipment (CPE) is configured at the customer's side in accordance with an agreement for interfacing with the service provider's equipment at the service provider's side to allow access to the communication service.
The enterprise or business customer's CPE may obtain connectivity to the communication service via a port on a router operated by the communication service provider. The port on the router may be dedicated or reserved primarily or completely for the use of the customer. A router is an electronic device that provides connectivity between two networks and typically supports routing of data packets to other network nodes based on addresses embedded in the header of the data packets.
Communication services may be defined, at least in part, by a service level agreement (SLA) that may define a class of service, a bandwidth, and other key communication parameters. A SLA may also define service availability, time to identify the cause of a customer affecting malfunction, time to repair a customer affecting malfunction, service provisioning time, and other. A quality of service (QoS) and/or a class of service associated with the communication service may be implied by the SLA.